PDF Cooking Cockroach A Guide to Modern Poverty Joey Truman 9781732959606 Books
PDF Cooking Cockroach A Guide to Modern Poverty Joey Truman 9781732959606 Books
Product details
|
Cooking Cockroach A Guide to Modern Poverty Joey Truman 9781732959606 Books Reviews
- It's been a long time since I went through a book like that.
(Be forewarned some of what follows is lightly spoiler-y)
Sort of an Apricots on the Nile for the down-and-out set? This is an interesting exercise in experimental writing, wherein the author describes his own life and experiences by intermingling recipes for meals he's made along the way - both regulars and one-offs. The narrative and culinary portions are interlarded with Mr. Truman's personal musings on various topics, typically - and unsurprisingly - hunger and poverty. It's important to foot stomp right now, at the very start, that this unexpected alloy of autobiography, cookbook, and ruminant sententiae actually works.
In my opinion, "Cooking Cockroach" is successful because it uses its manifold forms to deftly manage texture. At the very start of the book, the focus seems to be mainly on generating reader interest, which is critical. And so the sheer novelty of his descriptions of how to put together a fire to roast a chicken leg on page six are titillating, making one happy to continue
"Next, take a hatchet and cut chunks of rotting, dryish wood from a fallen tree a little deeper in the bushes, preferably walking over used toilet paper and empty beer cans to get there.
Next, bring the chunks of rotting, dryish wood to the fire pit and stack in a way that they make the fire very smoky. Observe people moving to get out of the smoke. Feel bad."
If the whole book had continued simply in this vein, it would have been amusing and kind of romp-ish, without being (I think) properly memorable for anything more than its amusement. But the author starts to glissando into meatier, weightier fields once he's established your attention, which lends his narrative a kind of transformational momentum. The first meditation on poverty - the one with the veteran under the bridge in the "Four-dollar, Three-day Hot Pot" recipe - is still mainly fun, but hints at more serious subject matter to follow. I remember, in particular, the opening paragraph to the chapter that starts on page 79
"I'm not poor, I took a vow of poverty. Or maybe it should be; I'm not broke, I took a vow of poverty. The implications are different. Being broke means you don't have any money at the moment. Being poor means you never have any money. You're a blight on society. I'm not broke, I'm poor."
And then you begin to get into the reasons why someone would choose to live in this sort of state (the "vow" of poverty is voluntary) and be a self-proclaimed blight on society, which is valuable content. If this had been offered up out of the gate, it would have risked sounding like a hipster social experiment or simply being inappropriate to a narrative format - the kind of thing better handled as an essay than anything else. But the in-and-out the author plays with the various forms is sustaining, without ever feeling artificial.
It's the right length too, which is important. Any shorter and it would have felt like an experiment that someone tried without seeing it through to the end. Any longer and it would have collapsed under the weight of its own canned beans and shredded cheese.
The only criticism I have is that, basically, my expectations for what the book would be were wrong at the start. Given the subtitle "A Guide to Modern Poverty", I'd thought the theme would be something more like social commentary, centering on the conditions of life in the author's hometown of Laramie, Wyoming. This meant I was thrown for a brief loop when the action changed to a different city, decades later (if my memory serves, this occurred on page 58). But once I'd reoriented to view the work as properly an exercise in experimental memoir, the good times started rolling again.
So many tacos.
Comments
Post a Comment